The Politics of “Pity” in the Hindi Public Sphere: Creating the Figure of the “Achut” and the Presenting the Upper-Caste Reformist Self

The May 1927 edition of the progressive Hindi journal Chānd presented itself as a radical break in the conversation on caste in north India. Titled “Achut Ank” (Untouchable Issue), the cover featured a photograph with this description: “The editor of the issue, Shri Pandit Nandkishore ji Tiwari, BA, who is a Sarayuparin Brahmin, co-dining with Bansilal Kori (Chamar), who is a compositor in the Hindi section” (my translation and emphasis). The 200 page issue featured thirty images and fifty pieces of opinions, essays, and creative writings on “untouchables” by notable leaders and intellectuals including Rabindranath Tagore, M. K. Gandhi, and Premchand among others but carried no writings by a representative of the community.

My paper takes the “Untouchable Issue” of Chānd as a key moment when the “Achut” or the untouchable entered the mainstream public sphere, not in first-person but as a recipient of pity. Chānd had published this special edition in response to Gandhi’s call for the upliftment of the outcastes. Read today, this collection reveals a number of impulses of upper-caste Hindu reformers rather than the concerns of their objects of reform. Using the method of reading against the grain, I show how in this moment, caste itself was transformed in a number of ways. First, the burden of caste was projected onto the body of the untouchable, displacing it from the rest of Hindu society whose caste location was sanitized and erased. Second, this moment marked the emergence of the affect of pity as a viable socio-political category of relationality which served to keep the untouchable "other" in silent objecthood, while subjectivity and agency were claimed by the reformist upper-caste “self.” Finally, this paper examines the imperatives behind this impulse that animated the construction of the casted other and casteless self through a model of “social trusteeship.”